Politics. Development Economics. Political Economy. General Social Science.

Main menu

Tag Archives: Burkina Faso

Where some see an anchor, others see a millstone. To maintain the euro peg, notes Ndongo Samba Sylla, a Senegalese economist, these very poor countries must track the hawkish monetary policy of the European Central Bank. Since the introduction of the euro, income per person in the franc zone has grown at 1.4% a year, compared with 2.5% in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

Non-commodity exporters, around half of the countries in the region, continue to perform well with growth levels at 4 percent or more. Those countries benefit from lower oil import prices, improvements in their business environments, and strong infrastructure investment. Countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Tanzania are expected to continue to grow at more than 6 percent for the next couple of years.

Most commodity exporters, however, are under severe economic strain. This is particularly the case for oil exporters like Angola, Nigeria, and five of the six countries from the Central African Economic and Monetary Union, whose near-term prospects have worsened significantly in recent months despite the modest uptick in oil prices. In these countries, repercussions from the initial shock are now spreading beyond the oil-related sectors to the entire economy, and the slowdown risks becoming deeply entrenched.

It should be obvious, but it bears repeating that there is quite a bit of variation in economic performance across the 55 states on this vast continent.

My personal Africa growth index consists of Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Ghana, Gabon, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya, Zambia, Angola, and South Africa. And despite ongoing turbulence in a number of the key economies in this basket, I am confident that the turbulence will not completely erase the gains of the last two decades.

Burkina Faso’s presidential guard declared a coup Thursday a day after seizing the interim president and senior government members, as the country geared up for its first elections since the overthrow of longtime leader Blaise Compaore.

Lieutenant-Colonel Mamadou Bamba appeared on national television to declare that a new “National Democratic Council” had put an end “to the deviant regime of transition” in the west African state.

Announcing the coup, Bamba said that “wide-ranging talks” were being held to form a government leading to “inclusive and peaceful elections.” Presidential guard members linked to ex-leader Compaore had burst into a cabinet meeting Wednesday and seized acting president Michel Kafando, prime Minister Isaac Zida and two ministers. Zida was himself once an officer in Compaore’s powerful Presidential Security Regiment (RSP), before he toppled his old boss after days of street protests in October 2014.

The coup raises two important questions about the transition process following last year’s coup:

Were elections planned too soon?

Was it wise for the constitutional court to completely sideline allies of Compaore from government despite the fact that they still wielded considerable de facto power (especially within the armed forces?)

Obviously the international community wanted to exit the scene as soon as possible. And elections provide a nice and easy way to do so. The practice stems from a perverse fetishization of elections as a generator of legitimacy, accountability, and stability. As a student of legislatures in Africa, one of the main takeaways from my work is that we (the international community, development professionals, academics) continue to ignore the role of intra-elite politics (and accountability chains) at enormous cost. We know that the biggest threat to rulers comes from regime insiders and fellow elites. We also know that revolutions and mass protests that topple bad leaders are rare events. So why do we continue to bury our heads in the sand and imagine that voters are the magical answer to problems of weak governance and elite political instability.

This is not to say that elections (i.e. mechanisms that reinforce vertical accountability) are completely useless. Rather, it is a reminder that elections should be designed to serve the dual purpose of keeping elites accountable and strengthening, rather than weakening, systems of intra-elite accountability. The historical experience in Africa and elsewhere and the logics of collective action demand this.

I finally got to reading Brian Levy’s Working With the Grain. It is easily the most underestimated development book of 2014, and should be read alongside William Easterly’s Tyranny of Experts(which it both complements and pushes back against). Like Easterly, Levy worked at the Bank and has insightful case studies and anecdotes from South Korea, to Ethiopia, to Bangladesh, among other countries. The book’s main thrust is that approaches to interventionist development policy ought to internalize the fact that:

… Successful reforms need to be aligned with a country’s political and institutional realities. For any specific reform, an incentive compatible approach begins by asking, who might be the critical mass of actors who both have standing and a stake in the proposed arrangements – and so are in a position to support and protect them in the face of opposition? [p. 142-3]

From a policy perspective, Levy tackles the relationship between governance, regime types, and development head on. How do you deal with the Biyas, Kagames or Zenawis of this world if you deeply care about [both] the material aspects of human welfare – roads, hospitals, schools, electricity, etc., [and] political freedoms and inclusive institutions?

Levy’s answer is that development experts should work with the grain, focusing on incrementally solidifying past gains in specific agencies and issue areas, instead of engaging in epic battles against ill-defined and equally poorly understood “bad institutions” and evils like “corruption.” He aptly points out that you do not need the full set of the “good governance” bundle in order to continue chugging along on the path to economic prosperity.

In other words, we don’t have to put everything else on pause until we get the institutions right (or topple the bad guys). It is not an all or nothing game. His argument is persuasive (“good governance” has failed as a prescriptive remedy for underdevelopment), albeit at the cost of casting the immense toll of living under autocratic regimes as somewhat ineluctable on the road to economic prosperity. But at least he dares to challenge conventional approaches to governance reform that have at best failed, and at worst distracted governing elites from initiatives that could have worked to improve human welfare in developing countries.

As I read the book I wondered what Levy might think of the current state of development research. We are lucky to live in an age of increasing appreciation for evidence-based policy development, implementation, and evaluation. However, the resulting aura of “objectivity” in development research often leaves little room for politics, and its inefficiencies and contextual nuances. Sometimes the quest for generalizability makes us get too much into the weeds and forget that what is good for journal reviewers seldom passes the politicians’ (or other influential actors’) incentive compatibility test, rendering our findings useless from their perspective.

Perhaps this is a call for greater investment in public policy schools (not two-day capacity building workshops) in the developing world that will train experts to bridge the gap between academic development research and actual policy formulation and implementation (talking to policymakers makes your realize that this gap is wider than you think). Linking research findings to actual policy may sound easy, but you only need to see a “policy recommendations” section of a report written by those of us in the academy to know that it is not.

“Mauritius’s state building success came on the backs of relentlessly exploited slaves and indentured labourers. Sugar planters compelled the government to ignore mistreatment on sugar estates, implement unreasonable fines and annual passport fees in the name of preventing ‘vagrancy,’ and harass those workers who tried to search for a better life in urban professions. Planters’ actions were expressly designed to subjugate and repress the politically powerless in order to maximise their economic power. Moreover, the fact that class divides coincided with racial difference meant that economic and political contention between elites and labourers on Mauritius became imbued with what was, at times, virulent racism. The worst of these endeavours were related to the planters’ quest to secure an adequate labour supply in the four decades after 1825. Later initiatives, such as railway construction and research and development programmes, were fairly benign. Together, these undertakings transformed the island’s economy and governmental capabilities. In Mauritius, then, one finds something of a developmental paradox: although the long- term consequences of state building have led to a regional ‘miracle’, the way in which the island’s elite and government laid the groundwork for it was normatively reprehensible.”

The paper mostly focuses on the success story that was Mauritian state (capacity) building. But this paragraph is a reminder to those who imagine a whiggish history for much of the developing world to go take a hard, honest look at history.

Throughout most of history, in order to have barons that successfully limited the power of the king or his equivalent (thus creating the roots of post-enlightenment democracy) you needed barons who could extract the life out of peasants. Wars that made states killed lots of young conscripts, confiscated private property and led to the demise of whole peoples’ ways of life (Not all French had French speaking ancestors, for instance). And speaking of the French, they went through lots of republics and dictatorships to become what they are today. Further afield, following its own civil war the institutions of government designed to protect human rights in the US had to look the other way until the 1960s in order to preserve its democracy. In the 20th century, decades of intolerant Kemalist ideological orthodoxy laid the foundation for the Islamic world’s most resilient democracy in Turkey.

Source Wikipedia. Darker shades indicate state failure in 2011.

Will Egypt, Rwanda, Kenya and the rest escape these patterns if they are ever to become Denmark, the supposed paragon of liberal democracy?

How does one go about state-building in a modern world with sacrosanct borders and a saner human rights regime?

Recent events in the DRC and CAR confirm the urgency with which we ought to address the question of state-building in the developing world in general, and in Sub-Saharan Africa in particular (see map).

Wars of conquest (which probably would have resulted in Rwanda, Angola and Uganda carving up the DRC) are no longer kosher. Add to that the demands of a tighter and saner human rights regime and you are left with little room to maneuver if you are trying to create an effective state (which occasionally may involve curtailment of political rights). Unless you can somehow insulate yourself from the so called stakeholders, including the International Bleeding Hearts Industrial Complex – like much of east Asia did through the 70s and 80s – you are left with a rather tricky situation of trying to forge a unified state with a million and one centrifugal forces with communal rights backed by threats of donor sanctions. The same system ensures that every rebel group that can cobble together a few guns gets to sit at the table (see Sudan, Mali, Burundi, DRC, CAR, Chad). The UN or some Nordic state pays the hotel bills. Western observers and their sponsoring organizations write reports. Some of them meticulously document human rights abuses by rebels and government troops alike.

Meanwhile censuses are never taken. Taxes are never collected. Little economic activity takes place. And millions of people continue to live just a little bit better than they would in some stateless state of nature.

The present international consensus appears to be one that believes in state-building through democracy and institutions. Lived reality for much of world history appears to contradict this consensus. In most cases democracy and the phantom great institutions appear to lag state-building.

The challenge for those of us interested in state-building is to think of ways to go about the effort in a manner that is sensitive to the present human rights regime and structure of the international system. The present urgency, occasioned by widespread human suffering in the less governed spaces of the globe, requires that all reasonable options (including some uncomfortable ones) be put on the table.

Gallup recently (April 25) released a new report showing approval ratings of African leaders. Many of them are inexplicably popular (a case of respondent preference falsification?). The polls were conducted in 2011.

Top of the list are the likes of Pierre Nkurunziza (Burundi) and Francois Bozize (CAF). Even the unapologetic, unreconstructed autocrats Paul Biya (Cameroon) and Blaise Compraore (Burkina Faso) poll above 70%.

The least popular African leader is Eduardo dos Santos of Angola who polled at a dismal 16%. Angola is Sub-Saharan Africa’s second largest oil producer and China’s largest trade partner on the continent – China imports upwards of 43% of Angola’s oil. The likely denouement of the dos Santos succession is still unclear but one cannot rule out the possibility of turmoil when Angola gets to cross that bridge, especially in light of the fact that Angola’s appear to blame both dos Santos and the country’s leadership.

Soldiers in Burkina Faso’s capital have mutinied, with gunfire resounding throughout Ouagadougou overnight. The protests began when members of the presidential guard started shooting into the air in protest at unpaid housing allowances.

President Blaise Compaore is due to meet a UN envoy in the city later, officials say, after he fled overnight. Mr Compaore, in power since 1987, had sought to calm soldiers earlier this month after similar complaints.

… the house of the president’s personal chief of staff had been burned down, some buildings and shops bombarded, including a pro-government radio station. The mutiny has come a surprise to many residents as the president had recently held a reconciliation meeting with the security forces, listening to their demands, Mr Thiombiano said.

Mr. Compraore has been in power since 1987. It is not yet clear how determined the mutineers are or if senior officers are behind the open rebellion against the Burkinabe president. More on this soon.

Like this:

Elizabeth Dickinson at FP asks. Whatever the answer might be one thing is clear: France still has commercial and geopolitical interests in French-speaking Africa and would love to maintain close ties with the region, even if it means propping up misguided dictators who buy homes in the French Riviera while their own people starve.

The BBC adds that “a human rights group has said that some of the troops and leaders should instead be facing trial for war crimes.”

The images of French president Nicholas Sarkozy sitting next to Blaise Compraore, the murderous Burkinabe autocrat who came to power in 1987 after dispatching his predecessor Thomas Sankara to his maker, captured it all.

African nations have finally woken up to the threat of the ever advancing Sahara. The “great green wall of Africa” will be several kilometres wide and stretch from Senegal to Djibouti. Whoever is funding this project should condition cash transfers on need level (aridity, terrain and what not) so we can have a way of measuring state capacity (and thus name and shame the laggards) across the many Sahelian states that will be planting this wall.

A Russian court on Friday ruled that Paul Whelan, a former U.S. marine accused of spying, should be held in a pre-trial detention facility for a further three months to give investigators more time to look into his case.

The Kurdish-led administration that runs much of northern Syria welcomed a U.S. decision to keep 200 American troops in the country after a pullout, saying it would protect their region and may encourage European states to keep forces there too.